20 useful sites for Cisco networking professionals
Our most-read Cisco Subnet post is our pick of 20 useful sites for Cisco networking professionals. We published the list in February and since then we’ve come across plenty more useful sites, so watch this space as we’re planning to update the list soon. If you own or know of a site that should be on the list, please send an e-mail to Linda Leung (lleung@nww.com).

Somehow NetworkWorld included this blog on that list. Please don’t let the good folks at NW make that type of mistake again. 🙂 If you have a CCIE (or other Cisco-centric) blog, go ahead an email Linda with your information.

I’ve been really busy the last few days. I will return to (semi) regular blogging tomorrow. In the meantime allow me to pimp out a new CCIE blog:

Welcome to the CCIE Buzz blog, written by CCIE candidates, CCIE Pursuit, CCIE Talk and CCIE Journey. You may know them through their own blogs; now you can read them on Network World in one single blog (and you can go to their their own respective blogs to read more of their CCIE tips, tricks and musings).

The CCIE Buzzers are engineers like you who will be sharing their CCIE journeys with you. CCIE Pursuit will post information about each stage of pursuing the CCIE; CCIE Talk will discuss how to get started with the CCIE; and CCIE Journey will discuss CCIE technical topics.

We hope you will enjoy the blog. We’d also love to hear your CCIE journeys as well, so please use this platform to chew the fat with your peers.

Please join me in welcoming the CCIE Buzzers.

Linda Leung
Cisco Subnet Editor

Each Monday I’ll be posting an entry covering the steps to becoming a CCIE. My first two posts are here and here. CCIE Talk’s first post is here. CCIE Journey – who must have naked pictures of someone over at NetworkWorld 🙂 – will be posting on Fridays.

IPexpert has created this blog site as an effective means to expand its dialogue with the IT training community. Through this blog, we hope to introduce a level of candor and connectedness throughout our organization, with open communications to those interested in participating at any level.

Our company is comprised of real people with families and goals, working hard to help you achieve your goals for your families as well. We invite you to get to know us – all of us – through this blog and the many other ways we make ourselves available to you.

Graded Labs– Graded Labs is the vendor who manages IE’s rack rentals. They’ve redesigned their webpage and have announced some upcoming improvements. Brian Dennis mentioned that they will be letting you name your saved sessions soon (which is good because decoding ‘2008.07.14-S2-13.37-RSRACK13’ to ‘IP Multicast Basic ‘ is a bit rough). They recently announced something that I suggested at the workshop (I’m sure they had the idea long before I brought it up):

Workbook Scaffolding – Currently in Development
Starting with the labs in Internetwork Expert’s Routing and Switching Workbook Volume 2, you will be able to one-click load the starting configurations for any task in the workbook. The purpose of this scaffolding is to increase your productivity by giving you the option to by-pass content that you have already mastered.

You will be able to load the configurations up to a certain section (task?) in a lab. That way if you want to work on Multicast you can load the configuration prior to that section and start the lab from that point. This is also great for when you get stuck. You may have fat-fingered something and can’t troubleshoot it (I’ve done more than my share of that). You can save out your configuration and then load the IE configuration and use that to find your problem. This will also help out when people post issues in the forum. They (or the forum mod) can load the configuration up to the previous section and then quickly address the task (instead of configuring the entire lab to that point).

CCIE>blog_ – IPexpert will be (re)launching CCIE Blog very soon. As I posted earlier, they will be “handsomely rewarding” the first 25 blogs registered. Since then, IPexpert has announced (via Twitter) that the first 10 blogs registered will receive an IPexpert end-to-end package (this includes two weeks of boot camps – see more details here).

ipexpert PASS THIS TO YOU FRIENDS (Ask them to follow) – When we announce CCIEblog.com – the first 10 people to launch a blog will win an E2E Program 09:19 PM July 12, 2008 from web

As I stated earlier, you can go to CCIE Blog and enter your email address and they will contact you when the site goes live. If I’m reading the tweet correctly, you’ll probably want to follow IPexpert on Twitter in order to have a shot at the 10 end-to-end prizes. You may want to contact Mike Down at IPexpert if you are interested, per his recent tweet:

Looking for bloggers! If you are interested in blogging about your CCIE Journey, please email me @ mdown@ccieblog.com – Mike about 21 hours ago from web

If you are interested in joining the crew and writing for ccieMagazine.com, please send an email to write@cciemagazine.com outlining a little bit about you, what topics you would like to write about, and possibly a sample article or two to give us a better idea of your writing style.

This would be a great idea for those who don’t want to deal with the updating a blog on a regular basis or those who already have their digits.

Anyhoo….It’s great to see more CCIE blogs popping up everyday (I’m waaaaay overdue for some updates to my list of CCIE blogs). I started blogging only because when I Googled “ccie blog” back in the day there were very few active CCIE blogs out there. The diversity of blogs and websites really helps the CCIE community out. If you feel that you can contribute to the community (and trust me – if I can blog, anyone can do it) then starting your own blog or joining one of the existing sites mentioned above is a great idea.

CCIEwiki will provide all you need to know about the exam experience, location info (including recommended hotels near testing centers, etc.)

RSS feeds pulled into your personalized study center

Useful tools for networking engineers

Much, much more to come…

Right now you can enter your email address at either (or both) sites and you will be updated when the sites launch. Both sites offer this intriguing bonus:

Once launched, the first 25 active CCIE>Blog_ sites will be rewarded handsomely. 🙂Once launched, the first 25 [EverythingIE] active memberswill be rewarded handsomely.

IPexpert has been giving away a ton of free training lately, so if you’re thinking about entering the glamorous world of CCIE blogging 🙂 you may want to think about using CCIEBlog as it seems likely you will end up with some free product.